Ghost
by cellotlix
Summary: "If she looks at him out of the corner of her eye, she doesn't recognize him. He's a bone-thin, harrowed survivor who has taken her bright, loving son's place. He's a ghost, drifting from room to room, leaving a chill behind. She's afraid to leave him alone, for fear that he'll disappear." Vignettes on grief from an outside perspective. Post ME1.


**AN: Anyone who follows me knows that I love the angst. Thankfully, after this I think I have exhausted the supply of Alchera-post Alchera feelings. Either way, I hope you enjoy. **

When her son first steps off the shuttle, she hardly recognizes him.

He's always been solid and strong, just like his father; even more so after he joined the Alliance. She would fawn over him during leave because that was their way, their little habit from before he was grown; the constant beseeching to eat more, because he's looking so thin, doesn't he want to grow up big and strong? It had been a ritual before, but now it's truth. He looks to her as if he's been starved. As if he's been weathered and aged. His eyes are hollow.

She would have wept at the sight of him if she had the freedom to do so.

"Hullo, Ma," he says in a voice like dead leaves scattered on the ground.

She doesn't say anything. Instead, she folds her beautiful, grieving son in her arms and holds him gently, as though fearful he will shatter in his arms.

She knows the look of what lurks in him. It's grief that goes beyond tears or words.

* * *

The drive home takes about half an hour, and for the most part it passes in silence. He watches the scenery pass by the window without really seeing; his eyes don't focus on details, only vague colors and shapes. Before, he would look out at Vancouver Bay and smile so wide that it looked like it would split his face wide open. "Good to be home," he would say, squeezing her hand.

Now, he doesn't even notice when they pass the bay and into the forest.

"How long is your leave?" she asks him softly.

He makes a rough noise in the back of his throat. "I don't know."

This is not the first sign of trouble, but it troubles her more than the rest. Her son is like a well-calibrated timepiece; his entire world moves by plan and purpose, ordained well in advance and followed to the letter. It terrifies her to hear otherwise.

"They haven't given you a return date?"

Another rough noise. "No."

"Why?"

He looks away. "I have to see a counselor."

And she understands instantly. The Alliance has deemed him unfit for duty. She could have guessed that by looking at him – thirty-pounds lighter, harrowed and hollowed, looking as stooped and ancient as a man who had grieved for a thousand years – but it's difficult to hear. It's affirmation of everything she feared.

"You're welcome here to stay here as long as you need," she tells him. "You know that."

He doesn't answer.

* * *

When David sees their son, he's unable to keep the horror out of his expression. But Kaidan doesn't seem to notice; he shakes his father's hand like a machine would, his eyes unfocused and dull before retreating into his room, closing the door quietly behind him.

"My god," David breathes. "What the hell happened to him?"

And though Kaidan hasn't told her any differently, she knows through an instinct that comes from years of motherhood, an ability to sense her son, to understand him better than he does himself at times. Grief hangs over his dark head like a shroud. Grief has hollowed him to bone.

"Someone died," she whispers.

* * *

Those first days break her heart.

Kaidan only eats when she begs him to, and then he can only manage a few bites of his old favorites before he pushes the plate away, looking ill. His hands shake as he guides each bite into his mouth. When she passes him the salt or the gravy or some such, she accidentally brushes his hand, and his skin is ice cold.

If she looks at him out of the corner of her eye, she doesn't recognize him. He's a bone-thin, harrowed survivor who has taken her bright, loving son's place. He's a ghost, drifting from room to room, leaving a chill behind.

She's afraid to leave him alone, for fear that he'll disappear.

* * *

David doesn't understand. He and Kaidan were never close, though this was at no fault of either of them. It wasn't dislike that made her husband remote to their young son; it was a kind of fear and self-consciousness that went beyond any attempts at expression. He would shrug off Kaidan's pleas to put away work and come play, and eventually Kaidan learned that work was how his father expressed his care.

The biotics might have had something to do with it too. David doesn't understand those, either. The power to bend the laws of physics David had known all his life, the power to subvert them and turn them outward, make them sharp and bladelike. Discomfort and fear turned her tender, shy husband to a stern, undemonstrative father.

She's come to accept this dynamic; slung between them as referee and peacemaker. Though at times, she wishes David would grow beyond it. She wishes Kaidan would forgive him for it.

They need each other now. David struggles watching his only child drift like a phantom through life, slowly relearning what a child would learn: to eat, to sleep, to speak. Kaidan struggles to touch anything that isn't insubstantial as air.

* * *

She's cleaning the kitchen and watching the news when she realizes what happened to her son.

It's a report on the Commander that was killed a few weeks ago. She remembers watching it live, recognizing that it was Kaidan's ship, and with every image that flashed across the screen of the ship breaking apart from within – salvaged from internal cameras, of course – a part of her died. She watched with David hovering around her, breathless with fear. She prayed desperately that Kaidan had survived.

And he had, in a technical way of speaking. But not in the important ways. Not in the way she meant.

The report flashes to a picture she's seen many times. It's of a beautiful red-haired woman in military dress blues, looking to some point over the viewer's shoulder, an eager, charming smile on her face. The dialogue is inaudible, but she watches the image change – this of the Commander in black armor with a red stripe, a smudge of dirt on one side of her face, the next a picture from a few years ago, the woman sporting a young, terrified expression as she addresses a crowd. Then – the woman and her son standing side by side.

It's an odd image; a candid one. They're unaware of the world beyond the two of them. He looks at her, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, and she looks away, but there is a sweet smile on her face, and slight color in her otherwise pale skin. They almost look like –

_Oh. _

How had she not realized this before? She'd known Kaidan had been transferred to Commander Shepard's ship, and that together they had stopped a rogue Spectre named Saren. His messages were vague, but he'd mention her once or twice – which in of itself was something out of the ordinary – yet still she had never quite put it together.

But there is no denying the tenderness in that captured moment, the beautiful, aching way that they look at each other. There's bravery in his eyes that she'd never quite seen in his father's; David had always been shy, even in the beginning (and she loved that about him). Here, Kaidan is bold. He is freed.

If only she'd known, perhaps she could have warned him. It would have been in vain, ultimately, but no one could tell her that she hadn't tried to shield her son from this pain. Her failure in this is absolute.

* * *

Over the next weeks, she watches him carefully for any sign of progress. He goes to see the Alliance grief counselor every few days, but despite this there is little improvement. He's not gaining weight, though he eats. He speaks, but it's in a dry, halting voice that she hates; a ghost's voice. He drifts from room to room with slightly more purpose, but it's still an insubstantial movement. If he walked in the snow, he would leave no tracks.

David grows more frustrated by the day. He's a practical, withdrawn man, and the tangled depth of this upsets him because it's not an easy thing to fix. He can't crack open his son and reposition a few wires, fiddle with a few settings, calibrate a little and voila – good as new.

If only it were that easy.

In an effort to bring him out of his solitary grief, she takes him along on her errands. He comes shopping with her, helps her clean the house, helps her cook. He does it all without complaint, and at times she thinks she almost sees a glimpse of her old son – no longer gaunt and harrowed and dead, but strong, full of life.

It doesn't take much to make him retreat back into his shell. When strains of an old song she likes comes on the radio, something closes behind his eyes like a guillotine, but not before he sucks in a quick gasp from behind clenched teeth. He fumbles for the radio and switches it off, his hands shaking.

"What's wrong?" she asks him in alarm.

"I – I don't like that song," he says, looking away, and she realizes that he's ashamed.

She does not pester him with further questions, nor does she turn on the radio in his presence again.

* * *

There are many such triggers, and she learns to avoid them.

He despises the sunrise, and mention of visiting a beach makes him recoil as if he'd been struck. Music upsets him as a general rule, but especially jazz. He eats only the most basic food; indeed, his old favorites seem to fill him with grief, most notably omelets. He avoids the news, for it's still likely that they'll run a segment on the poor, deceased Commander Shepard – a hero in her prime, taken far too soon.

But she is only human, and failure is inevitable. One night, David is watching the news while Kaidan helps her wash the dishes, and a segment comes on about Shepard's upcoming memorial service. David fumbles for the control and switches it off, but not before Kaidan makes a sound she's never heard before; a strangled kind of sob, half-swallowed.

He's trembling so bad that she fears he's having a fit, and she reaches out to touch his shoulder – just about the only wordless gesture of support he can tolerate these days. But he's already gone, the front door whooshing shut behind him.

* * *

"Are you sure you don't want me to come?" she asks Kaidan the day of the service.

"It's fine," he says in that voice she hates, a sand-paper voice. "I'll be home soon."

So she and David watch the service on the news. It's poorly attended for such a decorated serviceman, she notes, though everyone in attendance seems nearly insubstantial in grief. Nothing like Kaidan's – she didn't expect them all to suffer as he did – but it fills her with relief that he's not alone in this.

Though when the camera zooms in to focus on her son's downturned face, she wonders if perhaps he is alone among those Shepard left behind. They're functional, she notes, and he struggles. They're almost eloquent, and he's silent. When he speaks, it's with the voice of a phantom.

At that moment, she hates Shepard. It's illogical and cruel, and it gives her the distinct chill of walking over a grave. She was raised to fear and respect the dead, and it was horrible luck to speak or even think ill of them. And yet she does. She hates Shepard for lacking the skill to save herself, and save her son by extension.

She hates this dead woman for taking her bright son and leaving a ghost in his place.

* * *

There is a turning point, then.

"I don't understand him," David says one night, his hands pressing into his eyes.

She's frustrated too. Weeks of watching her son languish silently hurts her in a deeply physical way. "You've never tried," she says quietly, a trembling note of anger buried deep in her voice.

But David hears it, and he looks at her with sweet surprise, as if he can't believe she has turned on him in the span of such a short conversation. "That isn't true," he argues.

But she's finished with this conversation. She's so frustrated that she doesn't feel like herself – a good wife, a good mother. A listener above all, a nurturer, a healer; the roles she's carved out for herself from a time when she was younger and more pliable. She feels like yelling foul obscenities out into the sky where they will go on forever, the blunt edge of her anger brushing things aside as it travels at the speed of light.

Instead, she kicks on her flats and strides out into the garden, kneeling in the muddy bracken. She yanks weeds out of the dirt with nearly feral intensity, hurling them aside in a quickly growing pile. Even when the sun sets and it grows cold enough to raise a chill on her arms, she persists, reaching out blindly and yanking, yanking, yanking; as if the roots were manifestation of everything that has failed her, and everything that she has failed in equal measure.

It's much later when she realizes she's uprooted her whole garden instead of the weeds, which remain to taunt her.

Her frustration and anger don't even have the courtesy to sustain her now that she's destroyed something she loves. They fade, and only guilt and grief are left behind. She looks up into the sky, marking the pattern of stars as they slowly dance above her head, and a great emptiness settles just beneath her breast. Thirty-two years ago, Kaidan had grown there; a whisper at first, then beautifully skin and bone. Now he is a whisper again, only this time she is unable to give him flesh.

She would cry, if she could. She's so angry and frustrated and lost that she wonders if she ever knew what to do in situations like these. Surely her friends had suffered in such a way. Beth had lost her husband of thirty years to a heart attack, and there hadn't been any question of what to do. She'd baked for her, cared for her, cleaned for her. She'd sat beside her friend until the hours passed into darkness, bleeding into pale light once again. She'd offered her shoulder to Beth when there was nothing left.

None of that works now. Kaidan is as private as her husband.

And this failure culminates into something larger than any meager success she might have earned in years past. He's an adult, David would say. He can take care of himself. Perhaps that hurts just as much as the obvious truth otherwise; she's unnecessary now, regardless of whether he is man or ghost. As a man, he has shoulders broad enough to carry the loads in his life, and he doesn't need her. As a ghost, he's lost the worst to ask for help, perhaps even the inclination as well.

And she mourns this death more tenderly than she's mourned anything before. It was so much easier when he was a boy, when he'd come crying into the house with a skinned knee, blood trickling down his skinny legs. She'd sit him on the counter and disinfect the wound while he bit a trembling lip and tried to be strong though it hurt, and the hurt of it went beyond expression otherwise.

Perhaps she should have known it would be like this. When he'd come home from BAaT, he was different. Silent, harrowed, guilty. Later he learned that one of the instructors had been abusing the students, and her brave son had stood up to the turian responsible, breaking his neck when he lashed out with a knife. But even then, he'd eventually admitted what happened, though it was in the quiet voice of the guilty, the damned.

And now? Now there is nothing she can do at all. Her son is irrevocably changed beyond her ability to reach. He is insubstantial, bent by sorrow that goes beyond his years. And like David, he will hoard it like it is precious, or perhaps like it is shameful. There is nothing she can do. And that realization wounds her like a physical blow, a blade to her own, weak heart.

Among the ruins of her desiccated garden, she sobs.

"Mom?" comes a voice in the darkness. She feels a gentle hand on her shoulder, a warm body kneeling in the wet dirt beside her. And it takes her a moment to realize that his voice is not the dry rasp she's come to hate, but something a little more substantial, full of weight. It's as if this is the first time she's heard him speak like this in her whole life.

"Oh, Kaidan," she sobs.

He doesn't say anything; the effort of speaking taxes him. But he helps her to her feet and pulls her into his arms, and there she cries until she is wrung bone dry.

* * *

Later, the two of them sit in the kitchen. He makes the two of them hot mugs of chamomile tea and he sips his while she gulps hers. He hates chamomile, so she knows the gesture as one of solidarity. It encourages her – something her old son would have done.

"I'm sorry," he says finally.

"What do you have to be sorry for?" she gapes at him, her foolish, considerate son.

"I've made you unhappy," he says. "I've been selfish."

"You haven't."

"I should be trying harder," he says, his voice quiet. "I should be trying to move on."

"But . . . ?"

"But I don't know if that's possible. I'd like to be. My counselor thinks it is. I . . . haven't exactly been truthful to her, though." He rubs the back of his neck, and the gesture is so familiar and heartbreaking that it brings tears to her eyes again.

"Kaidan," she admonishes gently.

"I know. I know."

She pauses, weighing her words against the silence and a growing fear that she'll say the wrong thing and chase her son into hiding once again. "She . . . was important, wasn't she?"

He makes a noise under his breath. "So you've figured it out, have you?"

"Of course I have. I'm your mother. There are no secrets from your mother."

"I wish that there could be," Kaidan says, rubbing his eyes. "Then maybe I could have been able to keep you from being miserable on my account."

She is stern when she looks at him, infusing just enough temerity to push him away from this foolishness. "Enough of that. You would be miserable if I was, wouldn't you? Even if I didn't want you to. It's just what being family is about."

"Making each other miserable?" he says, and though it's not quite a joke, there is lightness in his words.

She smiles. "Sharing each other's pain."

"All right."

She hesitates, takes a sip of her tea. "Would you tell me a little about her?"

This is a dangerous question and she expects to be rebuffed immediately. Instead, he slowly turns his mug between his hands, watching the tea spin within, a hurt frown curving his lips. "Her name was Commander Shepard to most, but Sam to me, when no one else was around. She liked stupid jokes and puns, liked telling them even more. She didn't like attention much; crowds bothered her. I could tell you that she felt like an imposter most days, that she'd been chosen and promoted by some kind of sick joke."

"She told you so?"

He nods. "She wasn't fond of politics, and that aspect of her position as a Spectre was a real challenge. But she was stubborn and determined, and when she set her mind to something, she finished it to the best of her ability, which was often outstanding. She loved jazz, was a terrible cook, liked collecting model ships. She missed her mom."

Kaidan takes an unsteady breath. "She loved me. And I loved her."

"Oh, Kaidan," she says softly. "Was it . . . serious, then?"

He nods again. "I had asked her to marry me."

And that is the full weight of the situation laid out before her like the pages of a book, the translation bluntly obvious. If she ever harbored uncharitable thoughts that Kaidan behaved this way to spite her, to make her miserable, to prove her incompetent, that is the moment where she knows that she is wrong. This was no mere lover that he'd lost. This was something you found only once in a life. It would not come again.

"Oh, Kaidan," she whispers. "I'm so sorry."

They don't speak for a long time. He's lost in his own memories, though this time she can see that they do not only cause him pain. At one point, he almost smiles, and the sight of it is so familiar and beloved that she couldn't hate this woman her son loved, not even for dying and leaving him alone. Not when she'd made him so happy when she was alive.

"I would have liked to meet her," she says quietly.

"I would have liked to introduce you." He rubs the back of his neck again. "She was nervous about it. Kind of shy, almost. Which was funny to me. It would have been for you too if you'd ever seen her in battle."

"She was good, then?"

"She was the best."

She thinks about Commander Shepard and her son fighting the evil things of the galaxy as an inseparable team, strong where the other was weak, so that any enemy that faced them would face only strength. She thinks about Commander Shepard diving in between Kaidan and a bullet aimed for him, shooting with incredible skill to bring the assailant down.

Though she's never met Commander Shepard, she grieves because now she never will. This woman he loved so completely will only exist as a bittersweet memory, a fading shadow. She will only live as a ghost that will haunt him until the day he dies.

* * *

From that day onward, Kaidan begins to rediscover pieces of his old self. He speaks a little more. He gains weight. The circles beneath his eyes fade, if only slightly.

The counselor soon approves his return to service, and he's happy about this, as happy as he can manage these days. "I want to get back to work," he tells her. "I'm not good at vacation."

She approves, though she would never say no to more time spent with him. Work was something her old son loved. It's encouraging that this new man loves it too.

One day she comes home and finds Kaidan and David talking together, beers in hand, watching TV. And while Kaidan doesn't engage quite like he did before, it's better. He smiles at something his father has said, and the two of them look up at the same time when the door closes behind her. They look so alike; like two mirrors facing each other, one smudged with dust.

"Kathryn?"

"Mom? You okay?"

She wipes her eyes. "Of course."

* * *

There are times when she will catch him staring at some point in the distance, his eyes fathomless and dark. And she knows that he is thinking about her – the woman he lost, the woman he will carry with him in whatever capacity he can manage. She won't begrudge him that.

He turns when he senses her behind him and smiles. It is a weak thing, but she is thankful for the fact that it exists at all.

* * *

She watches her son board the shuttle. They check his ID before processing him through security, and they salute when he shoulders his duffel. He turns and waves over his shoulder before he steps through the doors of the shuttle and disappears.

She thinks to herself as the shuttle takes to the sky that he is no longer a ghost, but not quite a man either. Perhaps he's like a child, looking out at the world with a tender, vulnerable heart. Perhaps he's an old man, who has seen too much death and known too much loss for one life. Perhaps he is a cobbled patchwork of these things; a composite both young and old, both alive and dead. Whatever he is, she will know him as her son, and he will know her as safe.

She watches the bright point in the sky long after the shuttle has left.


End file.
